4A
NEWS / TUESDAY, APRIL 20, 2010 / THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN / KANSAN.COM
SPRING 1970 THE TIMES THEY ARE A-CHANGIN'
Lance Hill remembers when young people began questioning the government, racism, sexism and the lifestyles of their parents.
"It wasn't uncommon for people to change their political viewpoints quickly," said Hill, 19 in April 1970 and today executive director of the Southern Institute at Tulane University. "We had grown up on a set of myths about the country with respect to equality and justice and who we were as a power in the world."
Bill Tuttle, then a young assistant professor of history, said a walk on campus in the '60s was like traveling back another decade. Men sported short haircuts; women wore skirts instead of jeans and obeyed nightly curfews.
"The KU campus seemed to me to be quite like my college campus in 1959," said Tuttle, now professor emeritus of American Studies. "Very quiet, not much political activity, not a lot of long hair."
But by 1970, the campus had changed. Some people stayed the same, such as Jim Barnes, who said he was there just to go to school. Others turned into what Barnes called freaks, people who had long hair and beards, wore sandals and used drugs or had an activist agenda. Women could wear jeans and no longer had curfews. Students started underground newspapers, and used advocacy journalism the way The Kansan and the Lawrence Journal World didn't
The Oread neighborhood was a gathering place for students who frequented two bars, the Gaslight Tavern and the Rock Chalk Café known most recently as the Crossing. Students, dropouts and others formed what Hill called a "street community," which he joined when he dropped out after a semester.
"It was people who were college dropouts,people who had been expelled,people who came to Lawrence to be part of the counterculture and to be engaged in politics," he said. "There were a lot of runaways who found safe haven there. There were a lot of Vietnam veterans."
Roger Martin, who came to Lawrence from Columbia, Mo., was excited to see an underground newspaper, places hip people could hang out and lots of drugs.
1970 JAYHAWKER
Roger Martin
See Roger Martin talk about his experience at KU online.
CONTRIBUTED PHOTO
OVANSAN.COM
Grass: Not very much need at all
Vietnamese bogus grass -- $15 11d. It's
the old good sample bad done trick.
Lots of mediocre at $10-15 11d. Be careful.
DOPE
hash: Afghanistan Black -- $100 ounce, same great black hash, Pakistan -- $100 ounce, black hash, real fine. Not as heavy as Afghan, but much headier, one of Lawrence's finest ever. Red-- $100 an ounce, origin un known, fabulous head_hash. Let me say the hash site attribute of this first time Lawrence 3 outstanding hashes at once and all giving completely different highs -- Suggestion: if possible score a little bit of all three (yeah!)
Opium: $125 ounce? -- Incense opium -- nose opium, tastes great, smells great but doin't get you off well at all. Not bad to flavor pipes with but not much else.
Psachedelia:
**PRACTICE**
Psifotichin -- $3.50 -- great drug. Lots around. Pura clean mushrooms. Without a doubt the cleanest drug we ever done (for what that's worth). Very worthwhile! Large reddish-brown tails. Clear light drug.
Howy folks:
Hope you enjoy and put to good use the last column. The purpose of the column is to let people know what is fine town and how good the drug is.
This, hopefully, will help people get ridipped off or burnt. I hope you have as much fun reading it as I have researching it.
Acid: For the first time in ages. No real good acid in town (at least at the writing of this bulleish article). Cherry chewabies -- $1,50 light trip, slight speed. Not bad, not real good.
Mescaline: yellow tabs -- $1.50 to $2.00 -- heavy heavymescaline, Has speed so beware but a heavy trip just the same. Yellow caps -- $2.50 - $3 Mescaline. If you get one you'll be lucky. Among the top in Mescalines.
Well that's about it. Vacation really slowed things up. I'm sure this list won't be complete because a writer before I wrote was over and one never known what will return to Lawrence with their masters. I've go to go now and sell fifty pictures to four year old in his hometown, and next issue, this is the LUNATIC stylist you from the den of iniquity in Lawrence, Kansas.
University Archives/SPENCER RESEARCH LIBRARY
This column, from the underground newspaper Vortex, shows the drug prices and quality for that issue. The newspapers also included articles analyzing issues and politics of the time.
"The scene was very vibrant and alive" Martin said. He said there was "a lot of pointlessness to the lifestyle, because people were trying to redefine what it was that they were and who they were and how they lived, and so youd try things."
(CONTINUED FROM 1A)
The political climate of the country was changing, too. The Vietnam War was escalating, and young
See an audio slideshow of underground news papers and hear from their creators.
Events around the world caused students in Lawrence to reconsider their views. Beth Lindquist, who enrolled in 1966, originally lived in
Americans were dying by the thousands — more than 16,500 were killed in Vietnam in 1968, a number greater than that year's KU enrollment. Protests at the Democratic National Convention devolved into a riot and a high-profile trial of the Chicago 7, a court case that charged seven protesters for crossing state borders to incite a riot at the 1968 convention.
@KANSAN.COM
GSP Hall and then Kappa Kappa Gamma. She was a student senator and president of her residence hall.
"I did all the kind of traditional middle-class suburban girl things," she recalls.
But after seeing racism in the mostly white Greek recruitment and injustices in Vietnam, Lindquist made a new commitment to protest for change. She wasn't the only one.
"Students were dropping out and living in communes and growing their hair and professing a kind of anti-materialist view of American life," said Lindquist, now a dean of instruction at Metropolitan Community College of Kansas City.
Lindquist had been among more than 150 people who disrupted the annual ROTC review in May 1969. To them, the ROTC represented the military establishment and was one step away from Vietnam and the massacre of innocent civilians. Protesters gathered at Memorial Stadium, where the ROTC cadets were set to march, then moved inside and sat down to block the soldiers. They danced, chanted, talked.
Despite the lack of
Despite the lack on violence, the protesters suffered severe consequences. Some were expelled, thus losing their deferrals and immediately becoming eligible for the draft. Lindquist knew men who picked up and left for Canada to avoid being sent to Vietnam.
"There were others who were suspended who didn't return to the University ever, or any university," she said. "There were some who transferred."
Soon the draft lottery catalyzed one of the most turbulent springs in KU history.
A 7-Up bottle filled with gasoline, a rag and a match was all it took to get a story in a newspaper in the spring.
WHAT'S GOIN' ON
of 1970. Students were frustrated with the Vietnam War, racism, local politics and the conservative crackdown on the counterculture's free love and cheap drugs. Some marched, some dropped acid and some threw Molotov cocktails at windows of businesses, into the homes of prominent local officials and behind KU buildings.
Randy Gould, 20 that semester, said peaceful protests were less likely after he read about police assaulting members of the activist group Black Panthers and racists abusing blacks.
"I don't think historically we've ever seen real change in this country or anywhere else, for that matter, that wasn't
also accompanied by some type of violence," said Gould, a Kansas City resident who now updates a blog called the Oread Daily, the same name as the underground newspaper he started in mid 1970. "I also don't want to glorify the violence aspect of things. There were mistakes made that were too much."
Students and allies in the street community planned a strike for April 8 after the state Board of Regents blocked the promotions of two professors, one who had spoken negatively about the war. In a Kansan article from April 3, 1970, student activist John Naramore was quoted saying students should know about the "Regents' clamp" on the mood of the university, and that students should get "dramatically involved and should support the strike next week."
University Archives/SPENCER RESEARCH LIBRARY
Abbie Hoffman
The strike strategy: Station someone at the doors of all buildings on campus to encourage skipping class for the cause. Listen to a speech by the visiting Abbie Hoffman, one of the Chicago 7. And be wary of violence, a warning disregarded by some. The night before the strike, more bombs and Molotov cocktails exploded. The next day, Hoffman spoke to a packed Allen Fieldhouse.
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
As reported in The Kansan, Hoffman said, "People have really got to make up their minds that they are going to destroy the University. If they accept the student's role, they accept the role as a slave. The student is a nigger. Law is not for maintaining justice, it is for maintaining power."
but to a mixed reception. He described the people of Lawrence as unrevolutionary and offended many when he blew his nose into an American flae handkerchief
___
See a display of photos and items commemorating the Union fire in the Union gal lery all week
KANSAS UNION
--states."
"To get out of the draft I went to visit a psychiatrist on campus. I would always drop acid before I went so he really realized that I was not fit for military service," Gosh said.
ABOVE.
Firefighters put out flames in the Kansas Union ballroom. LEFT, Students help firefighters
University Arch
SPENCER RESEARCH LIBI
"I was dodging the draft. I was in ROTC at that time. They tried to draft me my sophomore officer. If you're going to go, go as an army officer. So I went into Army ROTC. The thing was, if you were a male and you flunked out of college, you had an all-expense paid trip to Saigon." - David Awbrey
"Many of these young men were so dead-set against going to the war that they chose to take really Draconian methods to make sure they would stay out of the war. One student dropped a heavy sofa on his big toe so he had a broken foot, which kept him out of the draft. Another guy who had来 to KU on a basketball scholarship, a tall, very physically well-built fellow, he knew there would be no way he would get out of the draft. So he did two things. First of all, he read all that he could on schizophrenia in the library... He learned how to answer as a crazy person. Secondly, when he was called up to take the
The draft lottery
--suitable to the draft.
... So I stayed awake for three days, taking speed, thinking if I do this I'll jack my blood pressure up. And it was high. By the time I got there it was 160/90, but what got me out, as soon as the doctor looked at my skin, said, "Oh that's psoriasis, you're out, it gets worse in Vietnam. I was immensely relieved. ... It's the best use of psoriasis that exists, is getting out of the draft."
"When it came time to be in the military, I went to the highest level of performance mode and even though I've been a performer for a long, long time, I have to say that was my greatest performance, at least so far. Because that one had more on the line than any of the other ones. It isn't even close, because I've done performances right here in the Pig, and they never said, 'Now if you fuck this up, you're going have to go and hide in the jungle with maniacs shooting at you.'" - Wayne Propst
Here are the stories of how some KU students stayed in the United States.
On Dec. 1, 1969, the selective service system conducted its draft lottery. Dates were put into plastic containers and then drawn at random, giving each birthday a draft number from one to 366. The draft affected men 18 to 26 years old, the demographic at KU.
--that exists, is getting out of the draft."
— Roger Martin
"Dropping out of school was a risky business. But actually, I had been called up for a physical before I dropped out of graduate school, and that was in November, because I was still eligible to the deferment."
--that exists, is getting out of the draft."
— Roger Martin
--that exists, is getting out of the draft."
— Roger Martin
Draft deferrals were the way to stay out of Vietnam. Men could file as conscientious objectors. Students could be exempt during school, but once they graduated or stopped attending, they were immediately eligible. Medical issues also often led to exemption.
ABOVE.
As the situation escalated, the students demanded that the school hire black teachers and a black counselor as well as meet their needs.
Racial tensions added to the already explosive Lawrence atmosphere. Two days after the strike, John Spearman of the Black Student Union encouraged all black students to arm themselves, saying they weren't safe and were receiving threats on their lives.
Racial conflict sparked at Lawrence High School that spring when its Black Student Union demanded a black homecoming queen and black cheerleaders in addition to the current ones. When the principal didn't meet demands, students locked themselves into the school's main office. Then fighting broke out over the next few days. One day 28 people were injured. Another day police threatened to use tear gas to disperse more than 100 students, some armed with tire irons, trying to enter the school.
well as meet their previous demands. Police used tear gas later when black students and residents broke windows at the high school.
Conservatives demanded that police and KU officials respond to protesters with tear gas, arrests and expulsions. Wayne Propt, part of the street community, called some of those conservatives rednocks, and tells of one day when a "red-neck" drove next to and began antagonizing George Kimball, who was walking down the street. Kimball, then 26 and later a candidate for Douglas County Sheriff, challenged the man to get out of his truck, and when he started to do just that, Kimball slammed the man's head in the
@KANSAN.COM
CONTRIBUTE
See Stan Spring,
his wife, Marv
talk about them
on campus.
the man's head in the door. The man's friend tried to get
A representative draws for the first birthday in the selective service on Dec. 1, 1969. The birthday dawn was Sept. 14.
bus to the recruiting center where he would be tested physically and psychologically, just before he got on the bus, he shaved himself totally, from head to toe. And then he oiled himself with a very strong fragrant lotion, the idea being that when he got to he recruiting center, though he's a tall, physically well-built man, they would see there was something a little off. And he was counting on being judged as a homosexual, and as such, in those days, this would be another strike against him.. I had another student who did indeed leave for Canada." - Beth Schultz, then a KU English professor, now retired
@KANSAN.COM
What draft number was assigned to your birthday? Find out online.
9 Students protest annual ROTC review by sitting on the field at Memorial Stadium where the cadets are supposed to march. Many protestors expended or expelled.
May 1969
7 Loan business downtown and animal research labs on campus bombed during the night. Bomb threats investigated at Smith Hall and a Laudromat on Ninth Street.
December 1969 1 First draft lottery starts, men 18 to 26 have a number assigned to their birth- days.
20 Kansas Board of Regents refuses to promote two professors, one who spoke out against the war. march 1970
About 4,000 students 1 rally in front of Strong Hall to protest the Regents' decision not to promote professors; the rally is peaceful despite fears of violence. Abbie Hoffman, a member of the Chicago 7, visits campus and speaks to a crowd at Allen Fieldhouse.
3 Black students at Lawrence High School lock them-selves in main office to enforce demands for a black queen and black cheerleaders.
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